Field
This disclosure is generally related to protocol stacks. More specifically, this disclosure is related to an auto-configurable transport stack which can automatically create and update a transport stack for an application based on a set of stack requirements.
Related Art
The ubiquitous nature of mobile computing devices and the Internet is making it possible for people to experience digital content from anywhere. People can use applications in their mobile computing devices to consume or interact with content from service providers across the Internet, such as to stream movies or music or to play games with others.
These advances in mobile computing are also increasing the quality of content that can be reproduced by these mobile devices and greatly increases the number of devices that can generate and capture digital content and share with others over the Internet. Nowadays, even small mobile devices such as smartphones can produce full high-definition video with high-quality color reproduction, and high-speed cellular and broadband networks make it possible for users to share this content with others over various Internet services, such as the YouTube (from Google, Inc.) and Facebook (from Facebook, Inc.) content-sharing services.
Many computer applications leverage these computer networks and Internet services to provide social features to its users, which greatly enhances the user experience. When an application wants to use the network, it does so by using one or more APIs that run on the computing device's operating system. These APIs provide a way for applications to send, receive, store, configure data or otherwise communicate with other computers across the network.
For example, an application first needs to instantiate a protocol stack that implements a network API before the application can use the API to send or receive data over the network. However, instantiating the API's protocol stack requires the application to explicitly instantiate and combine the protocol elements that implement the API's functionality that the application wishes to use. To make matters worse, if the protocols used by the computer network or a target server changes, the application will not be able to communicate with the target server, thereby hindering its use. The application's developer will need to rewrite and recompile the application using code that can construct the modified protocol stack for the new API.